By Tony Hicks
Sunday, January 16th, 2011 at 12:28 pm in Uncategorized.

I stumbled upon this after I saw a video of Cheap Trick playing on Conan recently, without Bun. E. Carlos on drums (an awesome version of “Dream Police” with real strings, played by people who looked like they were having a blast).
Panicked, because Cheap Trick is one of my most favoritist bands ever, and Bun. E. is one my favoritist drummers ever, I looked around and discovered an interview with Bun. E, when he explained he hadn’t quit the band, he was just touring touring with his side project Tinted Windows instead of Cheap Trick.

So in that story, I found this tidbit:

Months before the 1980 shooting death of John Lennon his Dakota apartment in New York City, the former Beatle was recording tracks that would later become “Double Fantasy.”

Lennon invited Bun E. Carlos and Rick Nielsen to play during the sessions at the Hit Factory, and the two members of Cheap Trick recorded a version of “I’m Losing You” that Yoko Ono ultimately convinced Lennon to scrap. Studio musicians were brought in and the Cheap Trick version of the song remained unreleased until the Lennon Anthology box set was released in 1998.

“We’d done five gigs in Canada that week and I woke up in Montreal and got a plane to New York and went straight to the studio,” Carlos recalls. “It was so cool, walking in because he was, ‘I know you guys, you’re in Cheap Trick.’ It’s like, ‘God, it’s John Lennon!’ He talked and it was just like seeing him in the (Beatles) movies.”

“Looking back on it it’s one of the highlights of my life, of my musical career.”

One Response to “John Lennon and Cheap Trick”

Yeah, Bun stopped touring last March with Cheap Trick, but Rick’s son Daxx is filling in very nicely. The band has been playing longer, more varied sets with Daxx, and the upcoming Dream Police shows in Milwaukee are expected to be pretty amazing.